Lena and Nicholas slip through a hidden gate into a forest where time bends, glass rings grow from the roots, and something waiting in the dark knows their names.
Mist hovered over the ground like spilled silver, and the trees seemed to murmur to one another in a language Lena almost recognised. She kept one hand wrapped around the old brass lantern she had found in a dusty recess of the manor library only moments earlier, as if it might still belong to the real world. Behind her, Nicholas stared at his phone with a frown deepening by the second.
"That’s impossible," he said. The compass app was spinning wildly, the arrow whirling as if it had been dropped into a storm.
They had come through the rusty gate hidden behind the fence of the abandoned manor house because the light flickering through its crack had looked wrong in a way that was hard to explain. Wrong, and impossible to ignore. Now the gate was gone from sight, swallowed by trunks and shadow, and the forest around them felt less like a place than a threshold that had decided not to let them leave.
The Astral Forest had all the stupid, whispered legends suburbia could invent to make itself feel important. Supposedly it hid old magic. Supposedly it took more than directions from people who wandered in too far. Lena had laughed at stories like that yesterday. Now she wasn’t laughing at anything.
"Do you hear that?" she asked.
Nicholas lifted his head. The forest had gone unnaturally still. No insects. No birds. No wind.
At the roots of a black-barked tree, something caught the lantern light. Lena crouched and brushed away wet leaves, revealing a perfect ring of glass shards embedded in the earth. Each fragment shimmered with a different colour, and when she leaned closer, she could almost hear the colours separately, as if the air had split into notes.
A line of faint carvings circled the shards, half-buried in moss. Nicholas stepped nearer, and the phone in his hand flashed once, then blacked out.
The leaves around them rose at the same time, lifting into the air without any wind at all.
"Lena—"
She looked up.
In the centre of the glass circle, shadow gathered into a shape that was not quite human and not quite smoke. Light moved under it like something trapped and breathing. The air tightened. The lantern went cold in Lena’s hand.
Then the figure opened its eyes, and they reflected places she had never seen: crystal towers, floating islands, mountains drifting through darkness like ash.
"Only those who learn the true name of the forest can leave," it said, in a voice soft enough to be mistaken for a thought. "Are you ready to begin?"
Lena and Nicholas looked at each other, and the circle beneath their feet gave a sharp, glassy crack.